The Prince George Golf and Curling Club stole two without the hammer in the 10th end for a surprise come-from-behind victory this week.
That's curling lingo to describe how hopeless it looked just one week ago, when it appeared there wouldn't be enough registrations to merit a shortened season after the ice plant gave up the ghost in the fall.
A new ice plant cost the club $163,000. It arrived on Nov. 12 and it took more than a month to install it, before it was finally fired up Tuesday, with ice soon to follow. The problem was that the club needed 450 curlers to sign up in two weeks, generating $60,000 in revenue, to cover two-and-a-half months of league play starting in January.
That goal seemed impossible, as unlikely as scoring an eight-ender. Scrubbing the entire 2014-15 season would have come on the heels of the cancellation of the Kelly Cup back in February because of a lack of volunteers and low participation in the mens' leagues. It was the first time in 87 years that the Kelly Cup wasn't awarded.
Had the players and their registration fees not come forward, it could have been handshakes all around or, as longtime TSN curling announcer Vic Rauter would say, "make it a final" for curling in Prince George.
Gone are the days when curling was so popular in Prince George that even Salmon Valley had its own curling rink, when entire families played, starting as soon as they were old enough to push out of the hack and throw a rock, when curlers outnumbered golfers as members of the club and when socializing through the long winter started and ended at the curling club.
Yet curling prevails in Prince George.
Earlier this year, the golf and curling club hosted the B.C. Scotties, the provincial women's championship. Two Prince George teams qualified for the Scotties - the Tracey Jones and the Patti Knezevic foursomes. Knezevic's squad finished fourth but Knezevic still got to go to the national Scotties in Vancouver. The winning team, led by Kesa Van Osch from Victoria, were so impressed with Knezevic's play during their week in Prince George that they asked her to join them as their fifth player. While in Montreal, Knezevic played four games, including two as skip, when the flu bug hit the team hard, keeping the squad in the playoff hunt.
Local curlers, and the entire Prince George sports community, were proud to see Knezevic excel on the national stage under trying circumstances. Just how good is Team Knezevic? They qualified for the 2015 B.C. Scotties next month in Maple Ridge without the benefit of having local ice to practice on.
Yet she's not Prince George's biggest name in curling. That distinction would belong to Joe Rea, the head coach of Canada's wheelchair curling team that has taken gold at the last three Paralympic Games, including this year in Sochi, Russia.
Curling's history in Prince George has not only been good for the community but great for the economy. Prince George hosted the national women's championship in 1983 and again in 2000, that time at the relatively new Multiplex. Now the CN Centre, the facility hosted the Road to the Roar in 2009, the pre-Olympic men's and women's curling qualifier, with many top teams from across Canada taking part. Those events not only brought in big dollars, they were used as examples to convince the Canada Games selection committee to choose Prince George over Kelowna and Kamloops to host the 2015 Canada Winter Games.
The game is suffering locally, there's no question. Curling doesn't have the social cache it once did. The aging population means there are fewer kids available to take part in the junior programs and that new generation would rather stay inside with their XBoxes than slide and throw rocks on ice. Meanwhile, many older curlers are spending part or all of the curling season as snowbirds in Texas, Arizona and California.
Hopefully curling never leaves Prince George. It is a much cheaper and much more social winter sport for children, compared to hockey and figure skating, and it's a sport, like golf, that can be played at a high level much later in life than most other sports.
It's a great Canadian sport that brings families and communities together.
